Office

Catalog for the exhibition From the Book Forest: Commercial Publishing in Late Imperial China, featuring works from the C.V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley. With an essay by Deborah Rudolph, Guest Curator.

Inspired by the end of the Soviet occupation in 1994, Kay Wilson, Curator of the Print and Drawing Study Room, and John Mohan, Professor of Russian, traveled to Estonia to discover art that reflected major social and political change. They found art inspired by Estonian history and landscape indicating a powerful national renewal. The exhibition and catalogue represent the works of 17 Estonian artists and one artist collective, Studio 22, through individual biographies and color reproductions.

Curious about the state of modern sculpture, and specifically organic forms in sculpture, this exhibition invites exploration into a transformation of forms. Curator Lesley Wright writes in the introduction, Nature persists but in various states depending on the particular human filters applied by the artist. In our virtual world, it is the energy of nature that continues to fascinate, and it's the aspect that these sculptors, as creators, continue to try to harness. After all, without energy inside, there is no life.

As part of the Exhibition Seminar course offered at Grinnell College, fourteen students worked with guest curator Victoria Rovine to organize the exhibit and write the catalog. The catalog provides information on sculptures, masks, drums, and other objects from the college's permanent collection that were used for this exhibit.

While we were spending a lot of time on the back-end of our web management, our site grew, organically, freely, and not necessarily coherently. So we decided to take the next, long overdue step: to look what the actual user experience. Normally, people are scared of the audits and the consequences they might bring. We were different. We were begging for our audit. We wanted someone with hands on, real world experience to look at our site and the ways we use it.

Early Days at Grinnell

Burling Library's Listening Room is set to undergo a major renovation beginning this summer (see periodic updates at http://listenroomren.wordpress.com/). Plans are in place to expand the room so that library patrons can have direct access to most of the collection of over 20,000 DVD, VHS, Blu-ray and compact discs. The collections includes audio recordings in Classical, popular, and world music or spoken texts, as well as feature and documentary films covering foreign languages and an extensive range of genres.